"For decades, patients who entered the gates of California mental hospitals were all but cut off from the rest of society – even after death.

From the 1880s into the 1960s, the lives of about 45,000 patients at Napa State Hospital and other state institutions ended not with a casket and headstone, but with unmarked graves or the scattering of anonymous ashes in obscure fields.

To bestow some belated dignity to those denied it after their deaths, advocates for the disabled mark the third Monday each September to honor those who died while institutionalized. On Monday, one of the nine statewide ceremonies staged by the California Memorial Project brought together present-day patients at Napa State Hospital to commemorate the patients who came before."